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Review

How do I write about the marvelous Catfish
without giving away too much of its bizarre trajectory? Very carefully.
It’s a new-style narrative documentary that dramatizes the paradox of
the Internet, which has made us all so much closer to one another yet
created so many more ways for us to misrepresent ourselves. (It sets the
table for the upcoming David Fincher–Aaron Sorkin Facebook drama, The
Social Network.) For Catfish, directors Ariel Schulman
and Henry Joost began shooting Schulman’s brother, a photographer named
Nev, after an 8-year-old Michigan girl, Abby, contacted him via Facebook
to ask if she could do a painting of a striking dance photo he’d just
published. When it arrives, the painting is better than good; it
captures the energy in the female dancer’s limbs, the sense of
transcendence in her flight. The little girl, an Abigail Breslin type in
photos, is a prodigy. Nev phones Abby’s mother, Angela, and then, as
his list of Facebook friends from Abby’s circle grows, enters into an
e-mail and phone relationship with her teenage half-sister, Megan, a
ripely pretty blonde who says she longs for him day and night. Ariel
Schulman and Joost follow the burgeoning romance avidly—which is, come
to think of it, another upshot of modern technology. In an age when
hi-def cameras are so affordable and you don’t have to pay for film, you
can keep a nonstop video diary of just about anything. You never know
where it will lead.

Obviously, Abby and Megan and their mother, Angela, are not exactly
what they say they are, but what—and who—are they? When the trio—using
Google Maps and a GPS—head off to rural Michigan in search of answers, Catfish
develops a Blair Witch Project–like vibe. Maybe Facebook will
claim three more victims! And here I must stop … except to say that the
last two words of the end titles (they are “including Angela,” but you
won’t know what they mean without the context) had me sobbing with joy.
Although Catfish is opportunistic, even borderline exploitive,
it gets at—by indirection, through the back door—the magic-carpet aspect
of this scary new medium. Real people are so complicated and
irreducible, you know?

If they’re real, that is. In the early
scenes, Nev’s excitement over Megan seems naïve. He’s a good-looking
guy—his nickname could be “Mr. Adorable”—and it’s hard to believe he’s
spending months obsessed with someone thousands of miles away … unless,
of course, he’s acting obsessed because it makes for a good movie. And
that’s where I must throw up my hands, because I no longer fully trust
my ability to tell real scenes from faked ones, especially in
first-person narrative documentaries. Parts of Tarnation turned
out to have been staged. Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop was
likely a prank—albeit one with its own satiric truth. I’m Still
Here: Well, who can tell what’s sincere in that Cloud Cuckoo Land?
We’ve always had to watch documentaries with a skeptical eye, with an
awareness that reality—even in supposedly fly-on-wall depictions—can be
so easily manipulated. But these days, it’s more insidious. All
documentary filmmakers must be viewed as potential scam artists. Sorry,
Fred Wiseman: We card everyone.
— David Edelstein